There are an estimated 94,000 children in Louisiana who have or have had an incarcerated parent. Many of those incarcerated parents have parents. They have siblings, significant others, spouses. All those people together form a sizable demographic, one that should be able to demand more family-friendly policies.

Since the mid-1990s, legislators have devised increasingly byzantine rules for those who have been punished. That ever-tightening leash has produced unintended outcomes with an almost mechanical predictability.